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If you’ve always dreamt of a trained Best Buy employee entering your home and telling you which electronic products you need, you are in luck, my friend. Starting this fall, you can beckon a Best Buy salesperson to your house, where they’ll try to sell you Best Buy products at no extra cost. Wish granted!…
We haven’t found too many practical uses for ferrofluid—a mix of oil and iron particles that appears to morph and change shape when exposed to magnets—aside from fun desktop toys. So now that we’ve discovered it becomes a nightmarish-looking blob creature when you mix in a little color, maybe it’s time to just stop making…
The National Weather Service is reporting 49.32 inches of total rainfall at a site southeast of Houston, which now marks the greatest accumulation of rainfall ever recorded in the contiguous United States on account of a single tropical storm. This latest rainfall figure still needs to be verified by other sources, but it’s likely to…
It took Antonio Stradivari months to create one of his instrumental masterpieces, but you can make yourself a tiny wooden violin in just a few hours using popsicle sticks, toothpicks, coffee stirrers, and string. It can’t be used to play Mozart, but you can still pretend to play it whenever your friends start complaining about…
As they say: Life comes at you fast. Yesterday, you were looking at a YouTube logo with the red thing on the right side, highlighting the word “Tube.” Today, it’s on the left side, sporting a play icon. It’s a small update to the design of a popular website, you might say. But will any…
This isn’t hyperbole. Between Apple’s ARKit and the new ARCore tool announced by Google, a viable form of augmented reality, the ability to witness an computer-augmented version of our world, is about to come to a whole lot of phones, and will be available on every Android and iOS phones going forward. That sci-fi future…
Apple is gearing up for its annual product announcement in September where it will reportedly debut a more expensive iPhone and a new 4K Apple TV. Apple wants to be able to tell customers that they can get 4K movies for a slightly less-extortionate price than its competitors are offering, but movie studios hate this…
It seems the smart speakers war is heating up, and Amazon is looking to stay out ahead of the pack. Starting today, Amazon is finally adding a feature for Alexa-enabled devices that will let you group multiple speakers together so you can synchronize your music across various rooms. Currently, the feature works with streaming platforms…
Extreme rainfall and flooding from Hurricane Harvey has left thousands in Houston and surrounding communities stranded. Some parts of the city have experienced over 40 inches of rain, and forecasters say that number is expected to rise over the coming days. Currently, the storm has repositioned itself in the Gulf of Mexico, where it will…
Remember 2012? It was an election year that pitted former Republican governor Mitt Romney against the incumbent, President Barack Obama. But Rick Santorum threw his hat in the ring early on with a disturbing ad about what the world would look like if Obama was re-elected. Good thing that didn’t happen, right? Yes, the futuristic…
LA-based entrepreneurs Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer wanted to create Witchsy, an online marketplace for their feminist-centered, darkly comic fashion accessories. But along with the usual woes that come with getting a startup off the ground, they had another problem: men. Talking to Fast Company, the duo discussed the phallus-shaped hurdles that stood between them…
An unstudied ichthyosaur fossil dating back to the Jurassic period is now the largest on record—a remarkably well-preserved specimen that also contains the remnants of a developing fetus. The female ichthyosaur, who was pregnant when she died some 200 million years ago, measured over 11 feet long (3.5 meters), according to new research published earlier…
Uber likes tracking things — competitors, cops, you. But now the company is trying to clean up its reputation by giving users a little bit of their privacy back. Uber plans to eliminate a feature that lets it track users for up to five minutes after their ride ends, Uber security chief Joe Sullivan told…
Tim Cook—a man who is totally, definitely running for president soon—is not like you or me. Besides vast wealth and power, the Apple executive seems trapped in a kernel panic of identical talking points, all of which The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin allowed him to rehash this morning in a Dealbook piece loudly…
Harvey inflicted catastrophic damage this past weekend, decimating the Texas coast as a Category 4 Hurricane, dumping feet of rain and bringing massive floods. But it’s still a Tropical Storm, and it is not finished yet. Harvey’s center has headed back out to the Gulf of Mexico, where additional moisture is causing thunderstorms to build…
Interchangeable lens shooters like the Sony A9 are evidence that mirrorless cameras can not only compete at the highest levels of photography, but they’re probably also the eventual successors to DSLRs. So you’d assume that a company like Canon would have made strong inroads into the mirrorless market by now, but with cameras like the…
The creator of Pepe the Frog, the once-lovable cartoon frog appropriated by the assorted white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other vile meme-makers of the so-called “alt right,” has successfully enforced a copyright claim against a dude who had Pepe drawn into a bigoted children’s book. Per Motherboard, artist Matt Furie—who is absolutely not a brownshirt, and…
Google has removed roughly 300 apps from its Play Store after security researchers from several internet infrastructure companies discovered that the seemingly harmless apps—offering video players and ringtones, among other features—were secretly hijacking Android devices to provide traffic for large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The botnet, nicknamed WireX, caught the attention of security…
It never fails. For every act of heroism during a national disaster another act of piracy is waiting in the wings. US-CERT, the US government’s chief agency responsible for detecting and minimizing cyber threats, issued an advisory on Monday warning about the proliferation of online scams aimed at those donating to ease the suffering of…
As Gizmodo reported Sunday night, many of the fighting sports fans who paid to see two men beat each other within an inch of their lives struggled to get their $100 worth. Lag, stuttering streams, or complete inability to access the Showtime app, The Hollywood Reporter notes, are now the basis for a class action…
